Girls, girls, girls

That's right, I was going to write about Stephanie.

But first -- I found a great new site. Suicide Girls is a porn site with a Riot Grrl look and feel. The girls are punked out, pierced, tatooed, and they're all about 22. If you like that kinds of thing, it rocks.

So about Stephanie. Above is a link to a page I started for her, once I realized she had no presence on the WWW. Usually, of course, it's not up to any person to make a page for some other person. It would be rude and intrusive, unless of course the subject is a public figure. But since Stephanie is dead, and nobody else has done it, I went ahead.

I met Stephanie in 1990 or 1991 when we were both in Queer Nation, a wondrous pack of fun and frolic. Queer Nation infused the usual headline-grabbing protest culture of San Francisco with a sense of humor. "Focus groups" would form around an affinity -- like our bisexual focus group -- or an event. An example of the latter was the group that pulled together the protest against Larry Lea on Halloween 1991; the focus group was named Grand Homosexual Outrage against Sickening Televangelists, or GHOST. Not only were we featured in national media -- I got on CNN and was quoted in the Wall St. Journal -- but journalists always named GHOST and splled out what it stood for. This counted as a trifecta win in the game of protest politics. Stephanie and I, along with several other friends, were members of (deep breath) Uppity BI Queers United In Their Overtly Unconventional Sexuality. What's that spell? UBIQUITOUS.

A year or so after Queen Nation peaked, I was still doing my magazine, Frighten the Horses. At the Folsom Street Fair of 1993, I staffed a booth with several other zinesters. Stephanie stopped by, we chatted, and one thing led to another. For some reason we never got together during the QN years, but in 1993, we did.

We were lovers for four years. About this I don't quite know what to say. Maybe it's ironic given that I'm a pornographer, but I've never talked much directly about the sex I've had with people. And for all the sex stories I've written, I never wrote one directly about her. But I have written about our affair and about Stephanie herself in bits and pieces in several stories: "Booth Girl," "Amateur," "How I Adore You" and "Caller Number One" all contain bits and pieces of our affair. Maybe the first two pages of "Caller Number One" come closest to being a documentary minute of our affair. It's in "Too Beautiful" -- that's a plug. Buy the book and see.

The greatest thing about Stephanie was how radical she was. She was a fervent vegan. She was the most genuinely bisexual woman I've ever known. She was completely unpossessive. She was not turned off or weirded out by anything, yet if I really used my imagination, I was capable of shocking her. She was love embodied. If these sound like the perfect ingredients for a lover, they are. I was so lucky to have been Stephanie's lover for so long.

Stephanie and I broke up about two years before her death. I saw her a week before she died, when we went hiking on Mount Tam. Typical Stephanie moment: She pied a garter snake in the grass, chased the frantic wriggling thing up the trail and grabbed it, shrieking "I caught you! I caught you!"

Then she released it and we watched it slither away through the grass. "Euww, my hands are all snakey now!" she then exclaimed. That was her -- joyful, spontaneous, weird. Rest in peace, my pearl.

 
Whoa there

Once in a while I search on the web for some mention of my work. By that I mean my two books and the magazine I used to publish, Frighten the Horses. Today I did the query a little differently than I ever had before, and I came upon this weird mention of the magazine:

FRIGHTEN THE HORSES. Its primary audience appears to be lesbians who enjoy bondage and sadomasochism. It contains many thoughtful and tender articles on the art of making love (excuse me for being so bold). I always thought myself worldly wise, and believed I had seen everything. But the article by the woman who dresses in diapers, sucks her thumb, and desires to be administered "disciplinary" enemas by her girlfriend was a real eye opener! Some dedicated readers even send in pictures. My issue featured a centerfold of a lady reminiscent of Margaux Hemingway (God rest her soul -- it's so sad when one is taken so young). The woman is bound, gagged, and tied to a ladder, while her lady friends drip hot candle wax on her belly. Ouch! I wish I had this magazine when I was still sewing [sic] my wild oats.

Gene Santagada

This was from a little article that comprised, ostensibly, a letter to the editor of the Publishers Clearinghouse Catalogue. It was written in 1996 -- at least a year after our last issue of the zine. I found it at http://cyberpsychos.netonecom.net/editor/pchsup.html.

The strange thing about the letter is that that woman looked nothing like Margeaux Hemingway. That is quite a stretch. I also don't remember publishing a story about a woman who wears diapers and sucks her thumb. Whatever.

 
Here to stay

I'm in Massachusetts, visiting the suburban Boston office of my employer on a business trip. This morning I drove into town to go to morning zazen at the Cambridge Buddhist Association, and on the way back to my hotel in the suburbs I turned on the radio. To my pleasure, I hit upon WZBC-FM, the Boston College radio station. They were playing a bunch a great jangly indie rock, and it reminded me of two things.

The first thing was that rock and roll is proving to be an immensely flexible genre, and because it's so flexible, it's still alive after fifty years. I'm not talking about the simple blues progressions that have been adapted into countless songs, or even the verse, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus structure that is so endlessly adaptable from song to song.

I'm talking about all the different parts or options that rock songwriters and musicians have to choose from, and the sum that is greater than all these parts. There are the classic rock instruments -- electric guitar, bass guitar, drums -- and other instruments that sweeten the mix, like organ, tambourine, harmonica. There are the classic vocal conventions of lead singer and backup chorus, coming from gospel. There are the conventions of solos, riffs and percussive instruments, coming from jazz. There is the beat, coming from r&b. There is the shouted or screamed vocal co-developed by Americans and the British. There is the convention of the singer-songwriter, invented by Woody Guthrie and confirmed by Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. There is the wonderful choral effect of the band's total sound, an effect first produced by big bands and jazz groups; that's what the record producer contributes.

And finally there is the notion that the single unit of rock and roll is not the song -- that is, the product of the songwriter -- but the recording. The product of the song plus the band plus the production.

None of this is new, but my point is that rock has many, many conventions which, taken together, are what make a rock and roll recording rock and roll and not jazz or r&b or folk or "Sing, Sing, Sing." No single record has all of the elements. But a record has to have a critical mass of them or it's not a rock record -- it's folk or r&b or something else.

So I'm immensely cheered when I hear some good, new stuff. The kids are still playing with this toy invented by their grandparents' generation! They're working within the genre, deepening and expanding it, and it's still not played out.

This discussion leaves out hip-hop, a genre I do not claim to understand or like (although that new Eminem song "Without Me" is stuck in my head like a bad cold).

And the other thing I was reminded of was my friend Stephanie. My ex-lover Stephanie, who is now dead. In her college years, she was a night-time DJ at WZBC. More about Stephanie in the next post.

 

 
Exhibitionism for the nerdy

Living in San Francisco, I have more than my share of chances at media exposure. When I was in Queer Nation, I played the "media whore" (as we called our spokespeople) for several different events. Then when I started putting out Frighten the Horses and later when I started published my books, I became just a wee bit more famous, at least for a dozen or two people.

And now, of course, we have the internet. One of the people who works at my company stumbled across this website. He wrote me "Cool site." But because I write about sex here and in my books, I am a little careful to separate my work life and my life as a pornographer, so what would you do? I basically answered "Thanks for the compliment; I kind of keep these things separate, but enjoy."

But that's not all. One of the guys who works for me is the boyfriend of the well-known humorist Cynthia Heimel. Now, I wouldn't want to be in that position, just like I wouldn't want to be the wife of a Las Vegas comedian. But anyway, here's her column on nerve.com all about their sex life.

Obviously it's different exhibiting yourself, the way I do (and the way Heimel does in her column -- I don't mean that in a bad way, it's a funny column, if kind of revealing), and making your partner a player in your journalist fun. I only make fun of people who bug me, like Josh. I wouldn't dare make sport of my partner Cris. Who can live with that?

This raises the question of how confessional my pornography is. I go into that in each of the pages devoted to my books (this one and that one). Not that I really go down the list and say "I've done this, this and this, but that, that and that are pure fantasy." What fun would that be? Besides, fantasy or not, my particular fetishes are pretty easy to tell from my books. (Now go out and buy them! I'm broke!)

The return of Mister Helpful

This morning in the zendo, a noisy fly buzzed around for the first twenty minutes. Something to listen to; I admit I waved it away a few times, when it sounded like it was coming in for a strafing run. I was reminded of something I read where the speaker, a longtime San Francisco Zen Center person, was quoting Reb Anderson, that temple's second white abbot. Anderson reportedly said that the reason people are so annoyed by the ubiquitous insects at Tassajara Mountain Zen Center is that "they think the bugs are optional."

Well, in San Francisco, the bugs pretty much are optional. And I've never heard a housefly buzzing around at 6:00 a.m. But there it was.

Finally, as it grew light outside, the fly went away to the other side of the room where the windows are. Making for the light, it smacked into a window: zzzzzzz-vut! and was heard no more. So much for that distraction.

When the bell rang, I stood up and got to see who else was in the room. "Josh," the nudge, reappeared several days ago, and has cut me a wide berth since returning. (Perhaps he read my weblog where I called him a nudge; that's the only explanation I can think of, hard as it is to believe anyone reads this at all.) He has hardly even looked at me, which suits me fine.

The only people there besides the regulars were this couple who come on Thursdays sometimes. Several weeks ago they got a full, unasked-for orientation from one of the priests -- but he's kind of the senior guy there, so he's got the right. That was before Josh came along at all, so he didn't know these two had already gotten the full spiel. So after the service when we all filed out (or actually just off to the shoes area, on the side), he went up to them and just started in. Stand this way -- hold your hands that way -- hold the sutra book this way -- the bells mean bow this way, et cetera.

I rolled my eyes, but as he went on and on -- the hapless couple humbly enduring it -- I glanced at him while I was putting my shoes on. He was so happy telling these people how to behave. He was still going at it as I left.

The funny thing about this is that later in the morning I read about Natalie Goldberg coming to the Minnesota Zen Center for the first time, how nobody told her what to do, and how that seemed so part of it.

But Hartford Street seems pretty informal about everything, frankly. It's really not strict. I don't know if that's part of the tradition there, or if it reflects the fact that the place seems a bit rudderless without a resident abbot or practice leader. (Kokai, the latest applicant, has vanished, so I guess something didn't work out about her. She seemed okay to me, but what do I know about how the place really runs.)

 
Unchained feeling
 
I'm reading a book by Natalie Goldberg called Long Quiet Highway. It combines an autobiography (I love to read them) with my two favorite topics, writing and contemplative spirituality. Goldberg, who is famous for a couple of how-to-write books, tells the story of how she became a writer and a meditator.
 
I'm really enjoying this book. Goldberg is a wonderful writer, and I relate to much of what she says. Since she talks a lot about freeing oneself to write and to live, and since she is famous for her other books on that topic, I expected to feel uplifted and inspired by this book.
 
Instead, it just makes me feel sad, and I'm not sure why. Partly jealousy, that she had the courage to challenge middle class expectations in her 20s a lot more than I did, and that she had such faith in her own development as she grew. Partly a recognition that, for all the people her techniques have inspired, I have never reallly been helped by them (like everyone else, I've tried them). Partly a recognition that, for all its promise and the real changes that did happen, much of the revolution of the 60s has fizzled. (Planet still theatened by ecodisaster; women and minorities still not free; Americans still getting fatter and fatter; consumerism still rampant. Meanwhile there's even more child slavery, international sex trade, ethnic genocide than there was in 1965 Just about the only thing that's a plus is a lowered nuclear threat.)
 
Now that I'm almost 46, I consider myself part of the Establishment. It doesn't matter that I'm a pornographer or bisexual or that I go to a zendo in the mornings. I'm a homeowner, a corporate manager, a churchgoer; I consume madly (the thing I'm most regretful of). So I'm not on the outside anymore, slinging mud, yelling, protesting. Now I'm on the inside, and I have to take responsibility for the state of the world. I can't blame it on my parents' generation. My generation has had 30 years to get things right; didn't happen. The world's as fucked up as it was in 1974 when I graduated from high school.
 
So I feel sad when I read about someone growing and blossoming in the culture of the 60s and 70s. Not that I didn't do as much of it as I could at the time, and later (I'm 8 years younger than Goldberg). But I've peeked ahead in the story, and I know that for all the promise and hopes of that time, things didn't turn out the way we expected.
 
I'd like to write more on this next time -- about the letdown of now.
 

 
Get together

My wondrous friend Marilyn Jaye Lewis -- an early contributor to my zine Frighten the Horses, a prolific author and editor of erotica and creator of several websites having to do with erotica -- is starting, yes, a new website. And it has a whole organization to go with it.

Last year Marilyn and I, along with writer Susannah Indigo, were nominated for Erotic Writer of the Year in the U.K. by a group that holds a huge annual awards shindig/performance/party/orgy. Marilyn won, of course, and we had so much fun that she started wondering why there were no such awards in the U.S. Marilyn, who contributes regularly to anthologies and knows everybody, felt there should be a way to recognize all the good work that's out there. So she has started the
Erotic Authors Association to “honor literary merit and achievement in the writing and publishing of erotic Literature.” They're looking for members and for nominations for this year. So get on over there and join the party.

By the way, Marilyn's project for last year, The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Erotica, is continually in the top five or six hundred over at Amazon. I surf over there to get a vicarious thrill. My books aren't doing nearly so well. My latest book, Too Beautiful and Other Stories (2d edition), is like number 770,000. It sure wouldn't hurt for somebody to write an Amazon review of it.

 
Who took the Bomp from the Bompalompalomp?

I'm still obsessively playing "Deceptacon DFA RMX" off the Insound site, while surfing the web for more about my new fave band, Le Tigre. I also found some mp3 files of parts of the original "Deceptacon," which led off the band's first, self-titled album. I was surprised to find that the original record is just a straight-ahead lo-fi garage rock song, which the "DFA RMX" version is set to a hip-hop beat that makes Le Tigre sound like the 21st century's answer to the Tom Tom Club.

One of the reasons I've been listening to the tune so much, aside from the fact that it's the most wonderful thing I've heard since that song "Gundaam" opened up the movie "Ghost World," is that the "DFA RMX" version is only available on vinyl.  Yes, because it's a dance version.   All right, I can dig it. But who the hell has a turntable nowadays? What am I supposed to do?

I guess I have to start stealing my music like the rest of the world and start with the mp3 downloading. Uch, I don't know a single 22-year-old. Who's going to teach me how?

 
Rama lama ding dong

I love the Insound website. Not only can I find all kinds of alternative music there I could never find anyplace else, but they have a constantly updated 25-song jukebox that clues me in to all sorts of fantastic shit I would never hear about otherwise. I've just been listening, for the tenth time straight, to Le Tigre doing ... what is it ... "Deceptacon DFA RMX" off their Remix 12 EP. It fucking rocks. It contains the phrase "rama lama ding dong." I think any song containing that phrase should be a number one hit. I haven't been so tickled by an old fifties r+b phrase since Clinton named to his cabinet somebody named Sha La La.

More on Le Tigre here.

Okay, so I'm actually showing how lame I am. Le Tigre was on Terry Gross's show "Fresh Air" more than a year and a half ago! (Go to Fresh Air's site and listen to the Sep. 5, 2000 show. I'm just discovering them. I don't care! They're great!

 
Thinking caps on!

Further to that bit about artistic savants and the possibility of normal people -- I guess you're not supposed to say that anymore are you? Oh, well -- being able to access similar narrowly-focused, high-powered brain skills: this article from the BBC. Supposedly someone has invented a device to stimulate brains such that users' brainpower is enhanced. Can't stop thinking of "Young Frankenstein".

I don't know why they need that. There's an espresso place just downstairs.

In other news, I couldn't stop laughing at this article in the SF Chronicle about a woman who married some rich goombah from Vegas and is now a "raw food chef." I had to stop reading around the time I got to the part about how she hauls her vegan ass to the farmers market in a Mercedes SUV, I was laughing so hard. Don't miss the pictures, especially the one where she's doing yoga in her enormous mansion with hubby -- on a MARBLE FLOOR! Now that's healthy!

 
Pesky memories

I spent a long time reading about zen before getting anywhere close to actually trying it. One of the things I read was a quote from someone who commented on the universal experience of meditators who, tyring to quiet their minds, are vexed by thoughts and memories that keep arising. This writer -- I've forgotten who, and where I read this -- said something like he wished he had stopped listening to the radio a long time ago because every lousy Top 40 song, commercial jingle and other scrap of audio from the last 30 years were now replaying in his mind during meditation.

I had read other accounts of unwanted memories and thoughts plaguing the meditator, but this was the only one which made it sound like your life was passing before your eyes, sort of like the first scene of the movie "Contact." In that film, the camera pulls back from earth and out into deep space, and as it gets farther and farther away from earth, the audience hears the whole history of broadcast television and radio, in reverse. Somewhere around Jupiter you hear Nixon resign. Farther out, "a day that will live in infamy." Even farther, "Watson, come here, I need you." And finally, the dots and dashes of Morse code -- presumably "What hath God wrought."

I was reminded of this when I read this article about autistic savants, with this intruging passage:

Compulsive practice might enhance these skills over time, but Snyder
contends that practice alone cannot explain the phenomenon. As evidence, he cites rare cases of sudden-onset savantism. Orlando Serrell, for example, was hit on the head by a baseball at the age of 10. A few months later, he began recalling an endless barrage of license-plate numbers, song lyrics, and weather reports.

More at http://www.discover.com/feb_02/featsavant.html -- a terrific article about savants and the potential for ordinary people to unlock the brain's functioning. I'm usually not interested in futuristic science articles, but this one is great.

Of course, my mind is a veritable riot of thoughts, memories and fantasies during meditation. It rarely calms down during the 40-minute session. I have to sit for a couple of hours before I really start calming down. That's why I wish I could go to tomorrow's monthly one day sit, which goes from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. But Cris and I have tickets to the ballgame, another opportunity to meditate.

 
Do it right

There's a new guy at the zendo -- I'll call him Josh. He's in his late 20s or early 30s, is lay-ordained (wears a rakusu), and has recently been getting the hang of the doan tasks (the doan rings the bells, carries incense, lights candles, etc.). Josh also takes it upon himself to helpfully tell me the right way to do things. Last week it was the right way to hold the sutra book. Yesterday he asked me if I had been to the beginner instruction held on Saturday mornings, and when I said no, he told me all about it.

Now, I've only been coming to the zendo for two months, and I still consider myself a beginner, but I don't need to be told how to sit or hold my hands. Don, the guy who is the regular doan, cocked an eyebrow and said, "Mark doesn't need beginner instruction. He's been coming for two months."

So this morning one of the priests, John, asked me for the second time if I would be interested in learning how to be doan. Josh, who was in the back straightening up, stuck his head out and piped up, "I'll train anybody to be a doan!"

"One of the guys at the zendo is a nudge," I told Jenny, my office mate this morning.

"So out of place in a zen context," she replied.

"He told me the right way to hold the sutra book."

"'Get the fuck out of my face, man, it's five a.m.!'"

"Really."

I have an ambivalent relationship to the zen "forms," as they refer to the standards for how and when to bow, walk, hold things, etc. On the one hand I respect and follow them as best I can. On the other hand, I don't find them interesting and I'm not particularly desperate to know the right way of doing things. So when Josh tells me the right way to do something, I just say "thank you." Not "Get the fuck out of my face," although that might be appropriate at some point.

I told John I might be interested in learning to be the doan at some point -- the bell-ringing looks like the most fun part -- but I felt I wasn't ready yet. And it's true. I just want to learn how to sit well. And now that Josh is around, Don doesn't need a backup.

Various positions

Sunday I went into the office to write, and I managed to write about 450 words to kick off chapter 15 of my novel. After that I was stuck. I spent the rest of the time looking at the outline and not being very focused. But it's progressing.... slowly....

Last week after zazen on Wednesday or Thursday, Jim Briggs was chatting with someone else saying there would be a new "beauty contest contestant" in Hartford Street's continuing search for a new practice leader. (This harked back to the confusion at the sesshin at the beginning of March when someone they had invited to lead the sesshin got pissed off by something at the very first and buggered off.) The new person is named Kokai Roberts (not the reporter Cokie Roberts, ha ha) and is from SFZC. She showed up today: a short slightly round woman with short, but not shaved, hair. At the end of zazen she left the zendo and went upstairs, as the doshi often does; but then she came back down after a few minutes and said hello.

After sitting seiza style on a cushion-and-a-half two or three times last week and finding it a little unstable, I decided to sit only on a cushion this morning. It was more stable, but also more painful for my feet toward the end. It was only bad for ten minutes at the end, though, not twenty, and I was able to go almost the whole forty-minute period before moving. And then I only moved a little.

I try not to get upset by all these attempts in various directions; I tell myself that the important thing is to be there and to try "sincerely," that eventually I'll find a good position if I just stick with it. I'm also mindful of an article I read by someone who had been sitting for twenty years; she wrote that she still finds herself changing her position as her body changes. So there's no final arrival, I guess.

I'm not even trying lotus or even half lotus. I would have done half lotus up to about 34 years old, maybe. After that I don't think I would have been flexible enough. It still doesn't make me want to start doing yoga, though, even though SFZC has someone who specifically teaches yoga to people to help them sit better.

 
Shocking the reader

After waiting several months with anticipation and then disappointment, I have finally found a review of my book How I Adore You. Marcy Sheiner reviewed it in The Spectator, 14 Jan 2002. This is the first real review of the book, as far as I know, and I'm glad of it.

I've met Marcy several times, and she's been supportive, if critical, of my work. I disagree, of course, with some of her opinions and her mostly negative evaluation of my book. I sense in her review, though, that she continues to support and respect my work.

I wanted to respond to one of the points she made in her review. She says:

The title story is one of two in the book written in a woman's voice, something Pritchard pulls off fairly well. The story begins with a promise: "It's not going to be top and bottom between us, Susan. It's just going to be real." Unfortunately, what follows is more shocking than real. Pritchard in fact revels in the art of the shock: I was on a panel with him once when he flung the most offensive material in his repertoire at a class of confused college kids. Not for nothing was the 'zine he used to publish called Frighten the Horses. No doubt, many radicals equate this ability to shock with some kind of revolutionary agenda - but I'm not one of them.

She goes on to discuss another piece, "the most shocking story in the book," Prom.

Both stories contain violence. In How I Adore You, the narrator tells about a past relationship where the play violence got out of hand. And in Prom (not "Prom Night" as she has it), the violence is out of hand pretty much throughout the story.

I deal with the outré aspects of Prom in both the book's afterword as well as in my comments on the story on this website, so I won't go into it at length here. Suffice it to say that I did not write this story simply to shock readers. Of course, I knew while I was writing it that people would find it shocking. I found it shocking while I was working on it, and many times I asked myself if I really wanted to go through with publishing it. But I felt the writing was good and that the story was genuine self-expression. Sheiner does not accept this reasoning -- she says she finds no redeeming value in the story at all -- and I respect her opinion while disagreeing with it. But I feel compelled to point out that the story also has a satirical element, which she ignores. I believe this element of satire, if nothing else, gives the story redeeming value, not just from a legal perspective, but from a literary one.

The title story is more complex and quite different in tone. It does surprise me that Sheiner was shocked by parts of this story. She doesn't say which parts, but I'm guessing they are the parts where the narrator recalls a past relationship in which committed acts of violence on her lover. While these incidents, depicted in flashback, involve extreme behavior, they don't come out of the blue. They are foreshadowed, and they are recalled in the context of an s/m scene happening in the present tense. By the time they are revealed, there's already been a lot of serious tussling between the two characters in the story, both physically and emotionally.

It is true the violent incidents in How I Adore You (the story) are calculated to give the reader a start when they are revealed. But that's different from them being gratuitous -- a charge Sheiner doesn't make explicitly, but implies. It's essential for the reader, and for Elena (the character the narrator is doing the scene with in present tense) to know about these events. If they're not revealed, the narrator would just seem a little neurotic and silly. Once we realize what sins she's committed in the past and what she's still capable of, Elena's unconditional love for her goes beyond a romantic conclusion of the story and becomes genuinely moving.

At least I think so. That story really means a lot to me, and I'm kind of disappointed a reader didn't connect with it. Oh well.

 Another New York Trip

We just got back from a few days in New York. The main reason we went there was for a book party for my friend Marilyn's book which she edited last year.

We spent the rest of the time just goofing around. Ask Cris and she'll tell you about a photo exhibit we saw at a place we always go to -- because it's close to the midtown hotel we always stay at -- the International Center of Photography. They had an exhibition of photos taken by North Vietnamese combat photographers -- very interesting.

We also saw an exhibit of those wild Henry Darger paintings -- he's that nut from Chicago who made all those long scroll-like fantasy paintings of the little girls fighting a war against the Glandolinians or whomever. Darger links:

- http://www.uiowa.edu/uima/darger.html
- http://henrydarger.tripod.com/

The weather was quite tolerable, except for the first evening. I have to say, it's so much nicer going there in the winter than in the dead of summer, like we did in July 2001. What a sweat broke out.

Now back to work... VERY busy for me. I mean my job. Cris is still lollygagging around the house, refusing to go to Dublin, Calif. -- a ghastly, centerless suburb 30 miles east of the City -- where Sybase moved in January. I mean, she is actually working out of the house. But she really is refusing, more or less, to go to Dublin.

I'm not getting much writing done, but a little, on weekends... I'm going on two business trips in the next few weeks and plan on holing up in my hotel as much as possible and writing there when I don't have to do something for work. I'm in the middle of Part 2 of my novel now, trying to get over the hump in the beginning of the third chapter of the part. I feel a real urgency to get this damn book finished and on to other projects. But it will still probably take another year at least even with steady work and discipline.

I'm doing zen meditation now. Every morning I drive to Hartford Street Zen Center in the Castro for 6 a.m. meditation! I like it.

 
Macho creeps and other zen masters

Last night Cris and I went to see an entertaining play written by a local author, a comedy that looks at the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. The play suggests that Shakespeare himself was merely a front, or beard -- thus the title "The Beard of Avon," yuk yuk -- for several different people in Queen Elizabeth's court, contributing only the odd poetic figure or monologue here and there.

That was fun, and light, and pretty well done. Outside it was raining and blustery, and this morning is gloriously clear and cold. I'm still getting up every morning at 5:25 and going over to the zen center in the Castro. They are friendly and encouraging. Today they gave me a copy of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," the classic collection of lectures by the Japanese guy who founded all the zen centers in northern California. It's one of those relics of the 60s that eveyrone in California reads sooner or later; the phrase "beginner's mind" has crept into the lexicon. I remember a dance teacher criticizing me in 1982 telling me I should "have more 'beginner's mind,'" and I didn't know what he was talking about. I really resented him saying that because his statement typified the kind of Californian arrogance that assumes everyone had read certain key alternative-movement texts. I suppose everyone had; but I only arrived in 1979, and I totally resisted all that shit at the time. I didn't want to be a hippie.

I'm also reading a collection of interviews of San Francisco poets of the Beat movement. It's interesting how many of these poets, who generally arrived in California in the 1940s or early 50s, became involved in zen.

I suppose that's all I'm going to notice for a few months. It's like when you buy a motorcycle and start riding it -- for several weeks you notice how many other motorcycles there are, and you feel like you're part of a big movement, when it's really just your perceptions that changed.

The Diane DiPrima interview is great -- she talks about how women were totally treated like beasts of burden by the macho male poets, who acted just like the macho men who were doing abstract expressionism. And there's plenty of evidence of that throughout the book, in interviews of people like Lew Welch. Even Gary Snyder -- he talks about all his experience with zen and all, but also takes pains to mention what a macho outdoor guy he was, "mountaineering" in his teenage years, working on a "trail crew," whatever that was, and generally being Mister Competent Alpha Male.

I get so tired of competent alpha males. There are plenty in business, of course -- it's the successful realm of ex-frat boys. There's a guy I work with who is never wrong, and who behaves impatiently if someone else displays less knowledge than he. Yesterday in a meeting, while someone on a conference call rattled on and on and repeated himself, this guy punched the "mute" button on the phone and shouted "Blah blah blah blah blah! I love the mute button! I love the mute button!" What a jerk.

Not that I'm above showing off or putting down people who I think are being stupid. In fact, I acted so superior when I was a kid that all the other kids basically ostracized me. It took me many years to see my part in this. I guess my co-worker is successful enough at hiding his scorn at key times so that a select group of people like and respect him; of course, they all consider themselves superior and more technical than everyone else.

This kind of elitism used to bug the hell out of me when I did contact improvisation. Now it bugs me in the software industry. I just think people should be more humble and egalitarian -- my own history as a know-it-all notwithstanding.

 

 
Okay then

It's my last chance to say something about Advent. First, another confession. This month has been sort of a down month for me. I thought November was worse, and I was grateful for all the rain this month, but on the other hand, I have been pretty poor in spirit for the last few weeks. Even Sunday morning's eucharist, with which I assisted, was somewhat hectic: I was not supposed to assist, and found out about it only off-handedly, and I was feeling a little pissed about that. it all went well, but then I went home and had a very stressful afternoon -- something about a party we went to hours late. Even that turned out well, but I was emotionally exhausted by the end of the day.

So I had to pray rather hard and sincerely for the true coming of Christ into my life. The kingdom of heaven -- if it exists -- is for the poor in spirit, Jesus said. I certainly qualify for that these days, and yet it's a paradox, because some days I am poor in spirit and other days I am rich. And that applies to just about everybody, I suppose, except peole who are clinically depressed or suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, which in these days of war must include a heck of a lot of people. For Christ to come into a broken world and heal -- not just the world but the people in it -- and not just the people as a mass (as the five thousand were fed or the ten lepers were cleaned), but healed individually, one by one and, perhaps, by name.

I was thinking of this when I was websurfing some Buddhist sites associated with the Ordinary Mind Zen schol, home of a teacher named Charlotte Joko Beck. She's the author of a book called Nothing Special: Living Zen which is, IMO, particularly good at explaining zen concepts to a nonpractitioner. If one of the commonalities of Christianity (at least as the term applies to a practice that follows the teachings of Jesus) and Buddhism (ditto Buddha) is that each is a Way for lay people -- an outline of practice that takes place within, not apart from, daily life -- then the ordinariness, or quotidian quality of one's life is exactly the realm where one's practice becomes clearest. For me, taking out the garbage, feeding the feral cats in the backyard, keeping the household accounts, making tea for Cris in the morning -- all these things which I ordinarily do should become, in themselves, my practice.

Then I wouldn't worry that I haven't managed to do morning and evening prayer, or else I would be able to say morning and evening prayer as I perform these tasks. (I know one is supposed to set aside a time for such prayer, but I'm also supposed to be setting aside time for writing, and I haven't done either in months. In fact, just about the only writing I've done has been in my private journal and in this weblog.) I've always felt a strong call to humility, and perhaps that should be my practice as I try to live in Advent even after Christmas.

 
End of autumn; film at 11

One of the little love habits bewteen me and Cris is to nickname everything, and one target of this cutesy practice is the local TV news. Instead of calling it "the news," we call it either the Rain Show or the Fire Show, depending on the season. Once in a while it's the Snow Show, but only when they lead with a shot of some poor bloke doing a standup in front of the Donner Summit sign on I-80. In these shots, the image of the snow blowing horizontally from behind the cameraman and past the reporter makes it look as if the reporter is actually streaking out of the background with little speed lines around him like a cartoon. The Snow Show is usually on at 11:00; it takes that long for the guy to get up there. At 5:00 and 6:00 it's the Rain Show, with reporters standing in puddles at the Sausalito exit from 101. It's about time for them to start warning of floods on the Russian River and showing people wearily digging out the sandbags for another year.

Yes, it's the official end of fall, and a stormy one it is, too. I just pray that the thunderbolt does not hit when I have a cat on my shoulder; I'd never find my bloody ear.

Once in a while I check in at Tomato Nation, one of the blogs that got me going on blogging. I don't know this woman; she simply posted a riveting Sep. 11 eyewitness account that was widely linked to. She's a good writer even if she is annoyingly gen-Y sometimes. Tonight I checked in, wondering about the mood of New York, and then thought, what if someone reads this someday (no one is now) and wants to know the mood of San Francisco?

The Mood of San Francisco

A lot of people are out of work, and getting very nervous because of it. But I can't claim to know a lot about that, even though I have good friends who are out of work -- because most of the people I hang out with are *at* work. In fact, I'm about to leave to go to a Xmas party hosted by a co-worker. Perhaps I'll know more about the mood of the city, at least the mood of its employed citizens, after I go to that.

Otherwise, let's see. All I really have to go on is saying the things that are true about me and guessing about whether they apply to a lot of people. I know I have been getting scads of requests in the mail for charity -- everyone from Friends of the Urban Forest to Planned Parenthood to Catholic groups (I subscribe to the National Catholic Reporter and they figure I'm fair game, even though I'm a Lutheran). I daresay everybody is getting this stuff, from the overpaid (like me) to the unemployed.

I think people are wondering what's going to happen next in the war. Now that we've supposedly kicked the butt of everybody in Afghanistan who hated us, but didn't find Lex Luthor or any of the other masterminds of the Sep. 11 attacks, people feel cheated of a neat Hollywood resolution; but people in San Francisco also feel guilty about feeling that way. It looks like even Bush has decided it's a bad idea to invade Iraq, so people are no doubt relieved about that.

I don't think anybody is concerned about whether or not "the economic stimulus package" passes Congress, but people are looking at the news from Argentina, which is falling apart, and wondering whether anything like that could happen here. People are not scared of terrorists or anthrax or anything like that anymore; three months have passed and the worst that's happened is a recession (except for the four or five people who died of anthrax, which was probably sent by some American idot anyway).

Television is just the same, yamming over the Next Big Thing, whether it's the Super Bowl (thankfully that shit hasn't started yet) or a prospective trial of the guy from Marin who fought with the Taliban. Have you noticed that there's always some Trial of the Year either underway, wrapping up, or being promo'ed? I am so tired of big court trials. I don't watch them or even follow them, but just watching the promos makes me tired.

All in all, for all the people who keep repeating "Everything has changed," I think life in San Francisco is pretty damn much the way it was before Sep. 11. Goodness knows the dotcom bubble collapsed long before that, like a year and a half before that, so thousands of people were already out of work. In fact, the fact that everyone is now recogizing that thousands of people are out of work probalby means that the situation will soon end. All the unemployed dotcom people will have jobs six months from now, mark my words.

Or it'll be like Argentina, in which case there will not even be a Blogger. Forgetaboutit.

 
For another

In Matthew 11: 2-6, John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the one we were told to expect, or are we to look for another?" It's a poignant moment. Though John has, in moments of inspiration, proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah and as "the Lamb of God," Jesus' recent actions have John wondering. Jesus hasn't been gathering a guerilla force to fight against the Romans; he's been hanging out with prostitutes and tax collectors and healing the sick. That's the message Jesus sends back, too, essentially telling John, "What you see is what you get."

After John's disciples depart, Jesus does a little stand-up comedy for the crowd. "What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet?" You can see the crowd laughing and going, "No, no, no... Hey wait, we did go out to see a prophet!"

Jesus answers, "Yeah, and what a prophet" -- I'm paraphrasing there -- and tells them that despite the fact that John is a great prophet, "the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." And then goes on to describe this Kingdom of Heaven in terms of a mustard seed, a woman who finds a coin that was lost, and other clear-as-mud metaphors.

He really knew how to fuck with people.

Advent is all about anticipating the coming of Christ, while at the same time recognizing that Christ is already among us, having come in the person of Jesus. Yet even while Jesus was among them, his followers weren't sure who he was. Because he wasn't acting the way they expected the Messiah to act, they thought, "Man, maybe this ain't him after all." And Jesus responds by saying, "No, this is exactly what I came to do -- heal the sick, preach the good news, and, incidentally, confound all your expectations."

So I have to look at my own expectations for myself. What the hell am I doing? My practice of daily prayer is completely trashed. I haven't written a word on my novel for more than six months. I can barely manage to keep my own house out of complete chaos, and I bounced my mortgage check. Yet I expect myself to do all these things well. All I can say is, I hope my failures put me among the "poor in spirit," because I sure haven't healed any sick people lately. (Cris is recovering from knee surgery mostly without my help; my main contribution is to serve her tea.)

In this dillema, Christ comes into my life in two ways: Christ shows me the way, and at the same time, accompanies me. I know what to do; despite his oracular tone, Jesus was actually very clear about how people should conduct their lives. I know I have to have patience and compassion in dealing with the world. I know I'll never do enough, or even be patient enough. But I am more so when I recognize that Christ is already here, accompanying me.

 
Oh jeez

And that's not said in a religious sense. I cuss (as they used to call it back in the midwest in the 60s) all the time. I learned to cuss at age 16 at my first job, the Jack in the Box at the corner of NASA Road One and Kirby Road. Partly it was because I was grown up enough to have my first job. Part of it was that it was impossible to work at Jack in the Box without resorting to profanity, as in, "The ice machine is completely fucked up" -- no other way to express it.

So anyway, yesterday was a bloody stupid day, and I should have had that Belle and Sebastian song ("Don't Leave the Light On, Baby") playing over and over. The worst moment was when I accidentally let the cat out the front door while trying strenuously not to let him out; I'm terrified he will run away, as he bagan life as a feral. I responded to this event by baning my head against the wall and nearly breaking down in tears. This morning I woke up and realized that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to have that latte at 5:00 pm, even if it was "half caf." I think I was having caffeine psychosis. It's happened once before and it's really no fun.

So I never made it to the Lusty Lady Play Day, what a bummer. I didn't get the chance to give a copy of my new book to Ayesha, the performer I pestered in the booth all summer while researching the new story "Booth Girl" (Hey, I really was going to a strip club for "research"!) and I didn't get the chance to contribute to the dancers' Xmas fund. But a couple of friends I recruited to go, went anyway, so at least the gals got something. I hope their Xmas pot was huge.

Maybe one of these days I'll get a chance to write about Advent. I'll try tomorrow.

 
You may already be a winner

This past summer, my friend Marilyn and I were nominated, along with writer Susannah Indigo, by the annual Erotic Awards in the U.K., for Writer of the Year. Marilyn won, and we had a great time at what seemed to be their queer sex worker community's big bash.

Perhaps inspired by this experience, and noting the lack of a similar shindig stateside, Marilyn and writer-editor William Dean (his site is cleansheets.com) are thinking of starting up awards for smut writers like me as well as anthology editors and erotica publishers. She's accepting ideas for awards categories and judging procedures, so if you'd like to put in your two cents, email her.

It'll be nice for porn writers to have something to fuss over. I'm not sure we'll gain a huge amount of recognition for it, but at least it will give us a chance to get together once a year, maybe put on a few workshops along with the awards, and develop closer ties. Right now I feel kind of estranged from most of the erotica writers in San Francisco, who rarely invite me to read at their events or contribute to their collections. I don't know why this is, and I guess I've done well enough as it is, but I know it's also nice to have others to talk to about your craft. I've always felt really fortunate to have Marilyn to talk shop with, but she lives 3000 miles away in New York. I wouldn't mind having a few people here to have drinks with.

One up-and-coming writer is Lisa Wolfe. You can read her story "The Amy Special" in the new Best Women's Erotica edited by Marcy Sheiner, and at brilliantsmut.com. She's just starting to get her stuff published, and she's pretty good. And she's a friend too; I'm sorta biased.

 
Support Your Local Stripper
There's a strip joint in San Francisco called the Lusty Lady. In 1997 they successfully unionized, becoming the only unionized strip joint in the U.S. A film about the union drive, called "Live Nude Girls Unite!" was recently released on video, and I saw it for the first time the other night. It's great.

Every year, about two weeks before Xmas, the Lusty Lady theater has its annual Xmas party. This is called Play Day. Management grants one day to the workers, during which all monies received go to a big pot which all the dancers split: that's their Xmas bonus. On this day only, the dancers do lap dances and all kinds of special stuff; on this day only, contact with customers is permitted. It's not like most strip joints these days where lap dancing is de rigeur; at the Lusty, they have glass between the talent and the customers.

Except for Play Day. Which is this Friday, Dec. 14th, 2001. Be there. (It's on Kearny St. between Columbus and Broadway in SF.)

For those people who are afraid to venture into a strip club -- and I am generally one of those people -- I can give a little bit of reassurance. You will not be made to buy a drink at inflated prices; they don't serve drinks. All they do is strip (and, on Play Day, lap dance), and if you want, you can go into a booth and watch dirty movies 25 cents at a time. Since, on Play Day, all the money goes to the dancers, don't worry about being cheap. Spend a little. These gals work hard -- I know, because I had a girlfriend who worked there, and generally it ain't all that fun. Play Day is their chance to fool around with the whole strip-club metaphor. They decorate the place in a crazy way, play the music they really like, wear crazy costumes, and in general cut up.

All the money goes to the dancers. If you still feel a little strange about it, rent the video (I got it at Lost Weekend Video on Valencia St.; they had several copies in the New section) and then you'll definitely want to support the women. Yay for the union!

 
High and Low

The ISP hosting my website offers me a free logging service so I can see how many people have been visiting the various pages of my site. And while there are a number of people logging on from AOL reading one of my old AFBD columns -- namely the one that describes my visit to a Times Square peep show and mentiones bestiality -- I know there's no one reading this weblog, even though I feature a prominent link to it from the front page of my site. In fact, I excerpt it on the front page of my site -- which means that of all the people who hit the front page, almost nobody clicks through to the weblog.

So I can say just about anything here. I can talk about religion or pornography! I can describe my co-workers in unflattering terms, or post gossip about people I used to be in Street Patrol with. All with complete impunity!

Talk about freedom of speech.

I'm probably talking about spirituality too much. Or about sex too much. Probably if I talked about one or the other, I'd get an audience on at least one side. But there probably aren't too many religious people who can stomach the proximity of all the sex, even though I don't think I've talked that much about sex in the blog. In any case, all you AOL people looking for bestiality info -- welcome. I'm sure this isn't what you're looking for, but here you are anyway. It wouldn't hurt you to read something else besides that one column.

So let me confront this issue for once. How can a person who is as serious about his spirituality as I seem to be, also be a pornographer?

In other essays on this site (like here and here) I talk about why I write erotica, or pornography, if you will: because sex held my interest long enough for me to develop my writing craft, and because there's a market for it (however small and totally not lucrative). I haven't really talked much about where I am with my spirituality or how I got here.

Briefly, then, because it's not a very unusual story: like many people, I was attracted to monastic spirituality through the writings of Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, and others. I visited a few monasteries and started attending a Benedictine spirituality group in San Francisco. I attend a Lutheran church and try to integrate all these various influences into something resembling a practice, although my discipline is horrible.

Perhaps the thing my spiritual practice and my writing have in common is an almost total lack of discipline. I'm very bad about doing things regularly, even when the notion appeals to me, as in the Liturgy of the Hours or a regular writing time. I let myself get distracted too easily. I'm lazy. My mind wanders. I want to stay in bed a little while longer.

So I'm not trying to present myself as a terrific writer or a terrific Christian on this website. I'm just using the site, and this weblog in particular, to work out some thoughts about both disciplines. (What do you call a discipline you're not disciplined at? Don't even ask about my totally lapsed practice of tai chi chuan.)

Today: a gorgeously clear winter day. Wish I'd spent it outside, but of course I worked all day, it being Monday. On the other hand, Sunday was beautiful, too, and I didn't spend much of it outside either. See? I suck at things I know are good for me.

 
Style... and Plot

A few days ago there was a terrific piece on writing style in the Washington Post. The author, Linton Weeks, talks about how distinctive style is almost absent from today's popular fiction, replaced by what he calls "No-Style." Weeks offers several tongue-in-cheek tips for writing a "No-Style bestseller," including "Put people in moral danger" and "Study current bestsellers" so you can "use every trick in the book."

Weeks goes on to contrast the effectless prose of Stephen King with the master of understatement, Ernest Hemingway, and quotes Vladimir Nabokov and Raymond Chandler on the importance of distinctive style. It's a great article, and gets more interesting as it goes along. At first you think it's going to be a sort of funny, shallow swipe at modern bestsellers, but it gets more and more thought-provoking as it goes along.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I love distinctive style and beautiful language in writing. I never went to creative writing school in the 80s or 90s, so I never learned to write in the flat, declarative, post-modern style that Weeks calls No-Style. I never pledged allegiance to Strunk & White's dictum of cutting everything that isn't essential. I've kept things in my own pieces that a post-modernist on the warpath would have cut.

On the other hand, I envy the ability of modern thriller and mystery writers to construct intricate, action-packed plots. My partner Cris reads a hundred mysteries a year; every month we pick up an armload of them. When she has something she wants to share with me, she always points out a sentence or paragraph that has a stylish ring to it, true. But I know what's really keeping her turning pages is the plot.

I have such a hard time with plot. Even though I developed a plotting exercise that helps me think of simple plots with a beginning, middle and end ( not too sophisticated), I'm intimidated by the level of plotting required in even the most pedestrian best-seller. And that's why it's hard for me to condemn people who write what my friend Marilyn referred to as "pre-digested crap." I can't do it, so I feel I have no room to act superior.

When I wrote a few days ago about the people doing National Novel Writing Month, one of the things I didn't say was that in order to write a novel that means anything at all, whether you're doing it in a month or not, is that it has to have some kind of story. It wouldn't be worth it for me to jam down 50,000 words (as their rules require), whether it's in a month or a decade, if there was no story that led a reader through.

That's what gets me. I feel I have to have a story worthy of putting down fifty or a hundred thousand words. Of course, I started my present novel project with just an image: the Rat Pack driving back and forth from L.A. to Las Vegas. (My misunderstanding of how they filmed "Ocean's 11" and appeared at the Sands each night.) I started with that image, did some research and corrected it, came up with a number of real and fictional incidents I wanted to portray, and just started. Of course that was three years ago, and I'm still only up to chapter 12.

 
One more blue moon

Hey, sorry this website was down for a few days. A little credit card difficulty, quickly cleared up once I realized what the problem was and found the right phone number.

The truly cold weather, which usually comes right around Thanksgiving, has arrived a week late. The days are still warm enough when there's sun, but the nights are damp and very chilly. Out in the suburbs it freezes on nights when it's not raining.

I had cause again this week to meditate on the crucifixion "King of the Jews" scene. A column in Sojourners magazine put it this way: Christ on the cross is both a king in glory and the Lamb of God. Then on Tuesday, a NYT review of a book called "Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God" contained the fascinating thesis that Christ sacrifice was not for the sins of mankind, but for God to atone for God changing the rules on the chosen people. Michiko Kakutani writes:

(Author Jack) Miles ... suggests that God's mutation in the New Testament from lion to lamb, from nationalistic warrior to universal bringer of eternal life was a response to historical circumstances: namely the first-century slaughter of the Jews of Palestine, which "was large enough to be comparable in its impact to the 20th-century slaughter of the Jews of Europe," and which raised radical questions about God's power and good will.

Since Israel was conquered by Assyria and Babylonia, God had promised that he "would restore Israel to its former glory," but centuries have passed, and "instead of the predicted kingdom of God, there has come the kingdom of the Romans, and its oppressiveness dwarfs that of all previous oppressors." It had become increasingly clear, Mr. Miles writes, that God was "simply too weak" or "was for some other, still more mysterious reason no longer willing to impose his will on history."

But, he adds, "instead of baldly declaring that he is unable to defeat his enemies, God may declare that he has no enemies, that he now refuses to recognize any distinction between friend and foe. He may announce that he now loves all people indiscriminately, as the sun shines equally everywhere, and then urge — as the law of a new broadened covenant — that his creatures extend to one another the same infinite tolerance of wrongdoing that henceforth he will extend, individually and collectively, to all of them."

Because God knew "that genocide against his chosen people was imminent and that he would do nothing to prevent it," Mr. Miles contends, he had to show first "that he himself is willing to pay the price this change will exact of them and, second, that this defeat presages another kind of victory": before the miracle of resurrection, he must "first suffer a physical horror equivalent to the horror that impends for his chosen people."

Wow! That's something to chew over.

Today a local public radio show called The California Report carried a story about National Novel Writing Month. Apparently they challenge all these people to sit down and whack out a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and 30. Today's the last day, so I missed it. Most of the people who participate are, of course, unpublished writers. There aren't any prizes; they just get the satisfaction of having finished a novel, of whatever quality. I agree there's a lot to be said for finishing something without worrying about whether or not it's perfect. They make light of the prospect of rewriting or, perhaps, burying the month's work under a bush. It all makes me feel like a real wimp, with my 20,000 words gathered over the course of three years and my fear of starting Part 2.

 
Still waiting

As usual, visiting Christine -- who is not only an ex-lover but a painter and former collaborator, back when we were both performance artists and choreographers -- gave me cause to do some thinking about my career as a writer. And I also had cause to consider it the week before, when I sat down with my friend Anna. Christine's 47, I'm 45, Anna's 25, but we're all dealing with issues of where we're going with our careers as artists, writers or whatever. We're just in different places.

With Anna, I can legitimately give a perspective based on where I've been. When I was 25, I was creating wildly on one hand, and filled with doubt on the other. Because I had a full-time day job (I always have) instead of trying to support myself through my artwork, I wondered if I was just a dilletante who would never turn out to be a serious artist. Now that I've managed to publish a magazine for four years, followed by two full-length books of short stories, that concern is lessened. I've got a track record I can look back on, even as I look forward and wonder when I'll get to the next plateau. Anna, on the other hand, is right there. She does lots and lots of journaling and has started a putative novel and wonders whether she's "serious." I tell her I've been there, try to reassure her.

Christine has always been more self-assured than me; her artistic vision has never failed her. She may go off on tangents, but she has faith they're where she needs to go. Since moving from San Francisco to the desert five years ago and stopping performing, she's taken up writing and painting. Curiously, the Twentynine Palms area is full of second-career artists. Debora Iyall, the singer of the great 80s new wave band Romeo Void, lives a couple of miles away and is also a painter. The desert is a hell of a great place to be a painter -- all that light.

So Christine and I went hiking and had a long talk about where our art was going. It's like nourishment to me, to talk to another serious artist -- and someone who takes my work more seriously, sometimes, than I manage to -- about the creative process, what we're making now, our doubts, our techniques, our ways of keeping faith in ourselves and our visions. I spent the rest of the trip -- through Death Valley, out to Las Vegas, and through the rain the next day from Barstow to Bakersfield -- thinking about spending more time working on my novel. Then I thought, "The problem is not finding more time, the problem is wasting less time on unproductive crap -- watching TV and so forth." Even this website is a distraction, although it's good for me to have a place to post things publicly.

On Sunday, after I got back to San Francisco, I went over to my friend Bob's house to help him move some stuff. Afterward we were sitting and drinking beer with a few other helpers, and Bob told them I was a pornographer. "Oh yeah?" one woman said, "talk about the issues!" I was game, but I asked her which issues in particular she had in mind. She struck me as straight and kind of political and I wasn't sure where to start. But she didn't really give me any place to start, so I didn't talk about any issues. (The individual pages I posted on this website for Too Beautiful and How I Adore You do have discussions on the "issues," as do the afterwords for both books.)

 
Desert trip

Our family Thanksgiving kind of fell apart this year. It was supposed to be at Cris's sister's house, and Cris and I had an inkling to go down to the desert instead. What ended up happening was that I went down to the desert alone, by car.

It was a road trip I'd wanted to take for a long time, but I did it in a very disorganized way. I took ten pair of underwear for a week, but forgot to pack any pants, so I had to wear the same pair all week. I forgot all kinds of stuff, including the power cord for my laptop. Then when I fired it up on the battery, I found I didn't even have the story I intended to work on. So I got nothing done this week, writing-wise.

What I did was drive down to my ex-lover's house. Christine lives near Twentynine Palms in the middle of nowhere -- specifically in the middle of Wonder Valley. We went hiking a little bit, I read a lot, and on Thanksgiving there was a dust storm. Or it might be exaggerating a wee bit to call it a dust storm, but anyway there was a lot of wind and blowing dust and sand, and visibility about a quarter mile. At the last minute we went over to a friend's, Perry's, for Thanksgiving chicken. Perry is this Wonder Fag from San Francisco who has followed Christine down to the desert -- they met 40 years ago in kindergarten in Monterrey Park, Calif. -- and now has his own place. He is a decorating fiend, and supposedly his cabin is now under consideration by Nest magazine for all the chachkas he has stuffed in there and the general wonderous atmosphere.

The next day I left the area and drove north across a few hundred miles of desert to Death Valley. It was a great drive through the Mojave Desert National Park and a lot of very minor roads -- I didn't see a billboard the whole time. But when I got to Death Valley, there was no place to stay. So I drove another couple hundred miles to Las Vegas and stayed in a TraveLodge under an underpass. It was actually surprisingly clean and comfortable for the price, $55. That's the West Sahara TraveLodge in Las Vegas.

I went to a sushi restaurant on West Sahara and a salesman sat down next to me at the sushi bar. He was some kind of regular who kept trying to engage the sushi chef in conversation. Atrocious overweight twentysomething salesman. He said, "I hate holidays, man. I can't make any money, and there's nothing to do." He also told about some ridiculous scheme he had to rip off one of his own employees by financing a car for him, and then charging the guy interest. "I'm gonna make about $2000 on the deal," he boasted. "Hey, I figure, he charges me for his labor, so I'm gonna charge him for my money. If he worked for free then I could do him a favor."

The next day I drove through a desert rain to Bakersfield, and today, home up through the lower Central Valley and the Salinas Valley. Highway 33 rocks!

Back to work tomorrow. I totally missed out on Christ the King services today, so there's not much to say about that. Actually I said most of it on the 20th from the desert. This is the last week of the church year, and Advent starts next Sunday.

 
Pilate the Bitter Queen

November, starting with all the All Saints stuff around Nov. 1, more or less leads up to the last Sunday of the month. The readings all talk about death, the next world, and the coming Kingdom of God. Readings from the old testament that talk about the first coming of the Messiah are juxtaposed with readings from the New Testament that talk about the second coming of Christ. The readings from the daily and Sunday offices these days are suitably apocalyptic -- apocalyptic because they always are at the end of the year, and suitably so because of the war and all. In the old testament, the readings are from Malachi, talking about how Israel will be destroyed. And the gospel for next Sunday is actually a crucifixion scene, telling how Jesus was crucified with a placard that Pilate had put up -- JESUS, KING OF THE JEWS. So the last Sunday of the church year is designated "Christ the King Sunday."

This is why I've always liked Pontius Pilate. A hapless functionary who has apparently been promoted to his level of incompetence, he finds himself smack in the middle of a great historical moment -- a little like George Bush fils. The Jewish authorities have brought Jesus to him, accusing Jesus of breaking their laws and asking that he be executed. Several times, Pilate dismisses them, saying he has no jurisdiction in such matters -- and no interest in them, either, obviously. But they finally convince him that Jesus is a threat to public security, so he goes along with the execution idea.

Though Pilate has failed his greatest test, knuckling under when he might have resisted the attempts to manipulate him, he manages a few dramatic gestures. He tries to engage Jesus in a philosophical debate, getting off a great line -- "What is truth?" He publicly, and literally, washes his hands of the affair to show the crucifixion is not his idea. Finally, in a gesture of scathing sarcasm designed to irritate the local authorities who had manipulated him, he has the placard made up and posted on the cross. Gratifyingly pissed off, the local panjandrums go to him and say, "Don't have it say 'King of the Jews,' rather 'He claimed he was King of the Jews.'"

"What I have written, I have written," Pilate harrumphs, and no doubt with a great sense of relief, withdraws from the spotlight. (It's not the last we hear of him, though. After the resurrection, he cooperates in a cover-up, in which the guards of the now-empty tomb are paid to go along, about how Jesus' body was actually stolen by his disciples rather than risen from the dead.) I appreciate these gestures, hollow though they appear to a believer from the perspective of centuries later. They ring with anger and heavy irony. They're the bitchy last words of a defeated drag queen who has been put down in public for the last time.

But anyway -- about the apocalyptic nature of November and the festival of "Christ the King" (or, as my gender-inclusive church has it, "Christ the Ruler"). It all has to do with the double-think nature of this time of year. In Advent (December), we sort of play-act looking forward to Christ's first coming. The month before, we actually look forward to Christ's second coming. Seems like it's in reverse order, but in fact Advent comes first in the church's calendar. We begin the church year looking forward to the first coming; we end the church year looking forward to the second.

This leads to a bit of whiplash come the first Sunday of Advent (which is the fourth Sunday before Christmas, 3 December this year). We all get down with the second coming and the end of the world. Then it's like the CD starts over again and we're back to the beginning. After Christmas, the secular events of New year's Eve and New Year's Day don't officially figure in things, although many churches do have services to commemorate these dates. On the evening of Dec. 31, 1999 especially, my congregation and many others had special services as a way of participating in what seemed, at the time, like momentous events. All the shit that was foretold for "Y2K" -- power blackouts, war, terrorist attacks, plague scares -- didn't happen then; it's happening now. But what's 18 months when you're talking about millennia?

That's why I say the apocalyptic readings are suitable for this time. The events of Sep. 11 and following may not be the end of the world, but they help set the mood. I won't cite all the biblical passages that can be matched up to current events -- war, plagues and all. That's always seemed beside the point, just as Halloween, to any adult, is beside the point. Of course we're all going to be skeletons and ghosts some day -- any adult over 40 feels that in his or her own bones. We don't need to dress up to remind us, because our friends have started to keel over. Kris Kovick, a terrific dame who founded the dyke spoken-word scene in San Francisco, and whose drawings appeared in my magazine Frighten the Horses and many, many other queer publications in the 1980s and 90s, died last month after an eight-year battle with breast cancer. Her memorial on Sunday was packed with "generations of baby dykes," as my friend Sara put it, whom Kris had encouraged to become writers and artists. Her influence will be felt in their work for many years. She becomes one of the saints.

 
The Writing Life

V. S. Naipaul, who has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was quoted in today's New York Times:

"I've had a fantasy," he said, one that was fulfilled twice, when he was writing "Guerrillas" (1975) and "A Bend in the River" (1979), "A fantasy of beginning a book in the autmn and writing through the winter, day after day, day after day." He smiles at the thought. "For me," he said, "that means pure pleasure."

Yes! How wonderful to be able to concentrate on nothing but your work through the dark morning and the short day, the book growing in secret like winter wheat. Come the beginning of Daylight Savings Time, it's finished. Spend the summer editing it and wrangling with the publisher. Then spend the early fall taking time off, resting, getting ideas, until it's time to do the next one.

Not that many people can do one a year, though. So perhaps you write a book only every two winters. Even then, it would be wonderful.

I have a novel I've started, stopped, picked up again, laid aside, taken up again. Right now the last time I had any time to work on it was the spring of 2001. I finally finished "part 1" and am waiting for some more free time to start part 2. I've been working on the book this way, on and off, for two or three years. I guess it'll get finished someday.

My friend Katia and I are having opposite experiences. While I am enjoying being a published author, I haven't been able to finish my novel yet. Katia, on the other hand, has just finished a novel she's been working on for four years, and now is working to get an agent. Publishing my collections of erotica came easy to me. I didn't have an agent; it just sort of happened, which is the way I prefer things to happen. But my novel will need an agent, like hers.

I need to devote that kind of time to my novel, and all my writing -- writing more and more until it becomes your life, writing day after day.

Turning to November

The day after we returned to San Francisco, the first storm of the year rolled in. It rained half the night and into the morning, let up for lunch, came down hard around 1:30, then departed. That was nice. Winter is truly here.

(We don't have much of a fall. We have summer through September, then we have a short Indian Summer, and then after an interim it starts raining. The interim, during which it gets a little darker and colder, is what passes for fall. Go up to Marin County, to the town of Ross -- a fine back-door access to Mount Tam -- if you want to see pretty leaves; otherwise, blink and you miss autumn.)

While it seems I'm fascinated with the weather, it's really the seasons I'm interested in. The heaven of an early June day when everything is blooming and all the flora is fawning; the cold spectacular clarity which usually occurs on January 1; the livewire excitement of the first evenings after daylight savings time starts and it's still light at 7:00; or in this case, the first heavy rain of winter, pouring from the skies as if in relief.

These seasonal signs, and other signs of change that mark the border between one state and another, or one time and another, are what excite me. The road from the interstate to our family's house in Illinois, back in the 60s, passed a Holiday Inn, back when Holiday Inns had those huge green signs with the big stars on top. The enormous sign, towering over the state highway, represented much more to me than a hotel. It was the whole adult world of freedom, of having your own car and enough money to travel the country and check into any motel you wanted.

But what I really wanted was to be driving by at the exact dusky moment when the sign sprang to life. It would be the moment between the dreary day and the exciting, neon-lit night, the moment when lights meant something.

No wonder I turned out queer.

So the first storm of the winter is one of my favorite moments. It means things are turning toward all the ending moments of the year, toward the holidays of lights. It's the moment when the lights start to come on.

 
 
 
Paris Wrap-up

Some thoughts, 48 hours after returning from a week-plus vacation in Paris:

Standing on stone      We spent much time in museums and churches, and by the end of the day, our middle-aged legs were wrecked. We finally figured this was because of the ubiquitous stone and/or marble flooring (not to mention all the stone or cobblestone plazas) found in these places. Even stone is not as bad as marble, which was especially hell on the ligaments and tendons around the knees and ankles -- anything that cushions the weight of your body as it moves. We went through a bottle of ibuprofen in less than a week.

Let's skip dinner      There are hundreds and hundreds of brasseries and cafes, and they all have pretty much the same menu, full of thick sauces, fatty meats and greasy fried things. After three days of this, and also due to the energy-sapping marble, we found ourselves skipping dinner and crashing in the hotel room after 5:00. When we did venture out to dinner, we found that kitchens don't even open until 7:00 p.m., and we were often the first ones in the place to order.

The best meal we had was at the restuarant at the Musee d'Orsay, where the lunch menu included a positively light dish of white fish with almost no sauce. We could have tried harder to find alternative places to eat, but by the time we were hungry, we had only the energy to find the nearest joint. The disadvantage to the standard brasserie menu, its predictability, is also its advantage: we knew what we would find.

The friendly French      The stereotype of snooty French waiters seems to be a thing of the past. We went into cafes and brasseries in a variety of locations, from the touristy to the obscure. In some cases they even supplied us with English-language menus (even when we didn't ask for them, which says something about our French abilities). When we limped along in French while ordering, the waiters and waitresses were invariably amiable and good-humored about bailing us out without embarrassing us. In some cases they corrected our usage, but in a very diplomatic way. The staff of our hotel was similarly friendly and helpful.

I don't know if this turnaround from the classic French haughtiness is because of some campaign to stamp out surliness -- I hear there have been some -- or, possibly, they're simply being nicer to Americans in the wake of Sep. 11. (In his radio essay on the Parisian reaction to the events of Sep. 11, David Sedaris recounted several instances of French people uncharacteristically reaching out to him in sympathy. See this link; Sedaris' piece is "Act Four" of the Sep. 21 program of "This American Life.") Whatever the reason, we were relieved not to have to deal with anyone's surly attitude. People in San Francsico are surly enough.

What is it with the smoking?      One habit the French haven't changed is their incessant smoking. I know their reputation and I was prepared to tolerate it as much as possible, and for the first several days, we weren't inundated too much. But then one evening we had dinner at a brasserie on the Place de la Republique, and two young men near us smoked Marlboros throughout the second half of our meal. What ventilation there was in the place (it being late fall, all the windows were closed) made the smoke drift right past our table. Kind of made it hard to enjoy the dessert.

I don't have any hope that they'll change their habits, but can we say a word about ventilation, please? In America, even smoking areas are well-ventilated so that the smokers do not have to stew in their own juice; in France, everybody does. Even in the airport, where there was smoking only at one (the only) coffee bar, smoke filled the whole area because there was no ventilation to draw it off. This, coupled with a seemingly delight in overheating interiors (stores, airport terminals, museums -- they were all too warm), makes for a sometimes oppressive environment.

Miscellaneous advice

1. At the Metro ticket window, order "un carnet," a little pile of ten Metro tickets. Saves money and time, and also motivates you to take the Metro instead of walking someplace. You'll walk enough, believe me.
2. Except for summer, the Metro is packed at rush hour, so try to avoid it 4:30-6:00 p.m.
3. If you must walk from the Musee d'Orsay to the Eiffel Tower, as we did, take the left (south) bank of the river. If you've just spent several hours in the museum, walking the right bank will exhaust you. As it did us.
4. Traveller's checks are for the birds. Just use your ATM card as you would in the U.S. No ATM fees, and a better exchange rate than at any currency exchange office.
5. Surrender to jet lag. Naps are good.

 
Waiting for Sunrise

It's Sunday evening and we're back from Paris. The 12-hour flight took off at noon and got in at 3:00 pm the same day. But since I never stopped being jetlagged the whole time I was in Paris, I can't really complain. Here's hoping I'll get a decent night's sleep tonight. I really loved being in Paris, but the whole sleep/jetlag problem was a real problem. No matter what time I went to bed, I would always wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. and have an energy crash at 4:00 p.m. So I'm really looking forward to a good night's sleep in my own bed.

During the hours between waking, say at 5:00 a.m., and Cris waking up at 8;30 or 9:00, I had a number of things I could do. My first urge was to get up and walk around -- what else am I in Paris for? But it doesn't even get light at this time of year until 7:00 or so, and it was cold and drizzly and actually rather depressing to walk the dark streets of the Marais for two hours. So I tended to lie in bed, trying to go back to sleep and never succeeding. Finally I would give up and get dressed and go out. I would walk to the nearby Place de la Republique (and sorry for leaving out the diacritical marks, I'm just too tired to worry about it) and buy an IHT, that lifeline of the expatriate. Then I'd go to a nearby cafe and have a café
au lait and a croissant.

What could be better, you may ask? To sit in Paris and watch the dawn break over the Place de la Republique, reading the paper, eating crossaints, etc.? Well, it would have been a tad more enjoyable without all the jet lag. But who else but the jet lagged would be up at that hour in the first place.

On the 12-hour flight home, it finally occurred to me that what I saw as an annoyance -- this business of waking before dawn and not being able to go back to sleep -- was actually a huge opportunity to pray and meditate like a monk. And I would have, too, if only it would have been possible to heat the room a little and have a little light. But the dankness and darkness of the room was oppressive, no matter how much like a monk's cell it really was. That's the problem with two-star hotels. So it was off to the cafe.

 
from Paris, 2

Saturday now in Paris -- we go home tomorrow. We never made it to the Musee Picasso or the Beaubourg. When we got to the former, it was closed, and on the way to the latter, we came across the Jewish Museum and spent the day there instead. This is our last day, and we're about to go up to Sacre Coeur, so I doubt we'll ever see the Beaubourg.

My naked ass has actually been exhibited at the Beaubourg. In the early 80s, I was one of several San Francisco bohemians who acted as models in a project by a photographer named Joe Gantz. His book "If It's Done Right It Is" had done well and he had a grant to do another book of his photographs -- typically nude surrealistic tableaux. He would gather eight or ten of us and haul us into some (closed to the public) public location such as the Stanford Art Gallery. There we would strip off our clothes and engage in weird tableaux of his design. In the one I remember best, several nude women stood on pedestals while four or five pairs of naked men, me among them, wrestled on the floor beneath them.

A year after these sessions ended, a friend of mine went to Paris and visited the Centre Pompidieu. "That looks like Mark's ass," she later told me she said to herself. "Hey, wait a minute, that is Mark's ass."

Unfortunately I never saw the book of these photos, if indeed it ever came out. If anybody knows Joe Gantz the photographer, I'd like to get one.

It's cold and sunny in Paris today. The rain has finally ended and it's a perfect day for our last day. Tomorrow I'll get back to the Advent themes of waiting, anticipation, and looking forward.

 
from Paris

I'm writing from the "Web Bar" near the hotel. This is a great block -- it has trees, a bar, a web cafe, two decent restaurants at the other end, and it's only a five-minute stoll from a major plaza with about 6 subway lines. Our hotel is cheap and comfortable and speaks English at those times when one is too tired or jet lagged to think of any French.

Sightseeing sightseeing, walking walking walking. At first it was hazy sun, then the last couple days it's been breezy and overcast and a little rainy. Everything going well. The best moment so far has been early yesterday evening, walking across a bridge over the Seine in the last rays of the sunset, everything so beautiful and Cris happy.

This morning I passed an older man with a crutch who was merrily singing "Camptown Races," in French, while crossing the street. Today, Musee Picasso and the Beaubourg.

 
Prescription for poverty

Every week I go to three different events where I have the opportuntity to meditate on scripture. On Monday it's the Canterbury Way group at Grace Cathedral; on Tuesday it's the Taize group at St. Gregory's; and on Wednesday it's lectio divina at my own church. This week, at all three meetings, the reading was the Beatitudes as they appear in Luke 6.

In this account of Jesus's famous speech, Jesus follows the blessings ("Blessed are the poor," etc.) with curses: "Woe to you who are rich now; you shall be poor. Woe to you who are full now; you shall be hungry." The reader is forced to come down on one side or the other. Am I someone presently poor who longs for the coming of God's reign, or am I rich, and need to cover my ass PDQ?

Listening to the blessings and curses Wednesday night, I was reminded of how I felt when I was a child. I was bullied and ostracized, like most young queers, even before I knew what queer was. Back then, I was definitely a candidate for the "Blessed are the poor" side of things.

Now, 35 years later, I'm an affluent, middle class, middle-aged white man. I own a house, make a preposterously large salary, and can afford to take my partner to Paris for her birthday. (We leave tomorrow.) By any measure, I'm rich, and as Jesus said, I have received my consolation.

What to do? The third part of the reading (verses 27-31) contains a solution to the dilemma. Without taking a breath, Jesus announces a series of actions that at first seem unrelated to the previous paragraphs.

But I say to you that hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from him who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.
Give to every one who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.

At first, I didn't understand how these are related to the blessings and curses. Then I realized that these statements are addressed directly to me, the rich man. Rich? Woe to you -- unless you can figure out a way to become poor again.

That's what this is -- a prescription for poverty. Too rich? Become poor. In San Francisco, if you "give to everyone who begs from you," you'll be poor pretty soon, all right. I dunno if I'm ready to do that. Maybe when we get back from Paris.

 
Blue Moon

Tonight, a full moon on Halloween, for the first time in 46 years, and a blue moon to boot. Seems like some kind of extremely rare coincidence, but come to think of it, any full moon on Halloween would be the second full moon of the month, thus "blue."

When I was in the Street Patrol, we had a Haloween security gig every year. Since there's a huge street party in the Castro District every year, and it's become well-known throughout the Bay Area, straight people come to gawk. This has basically ruined the event since the beginning of the 90s, with street-clad gawkers far outnumbering the costumed revellers, but what's worse is that homophobic teenagers see it as an opportunity to visit the neighborhood and bash queers. So we would make our way through the crowds for hours, clad in our fuschia berets, trying to stop evildoers. (Once we were on "60 Minutes.") The later it got, the more drunken and out of control the crowd became; after midnight, it would always get dicey. It got to where I would hope for rain to keep the crowds down and spoil the party, so as not to have to deal with violent drunks. Drunks are the most boring people in the world. It's like dealing with mean, stupid dogs.

But no chance of rain tonight. It's gorgeous today.

So I'm not exactly anticipating Halloween with much pleasure. In fact, since the Street Patrol broke up, I try to stay as far away as possible. I hate dressing up and I hate huge crowds and I hate drunks. It's sort of the worst possible place for me.

I've got some birthday shopping to do. My partner Cris' birthday is next week and we're off to Paris on Friday. So for several days this will become a Paris tourist diary, I guess.

Oh, and since it's the last day of the month, it's payday. I hate that I get anxious for payday to come. When you're a kid, it's okay to wish the days would go faster so that some eagerly anticipated day would come -- the last day or school, or Christmas, or a big date. But when you're an adult, as Joni Mitchell said, you drag your feet just to slow the circles down. And waiting anxiously for payday is just killing time. I hate that.